Recently I watched TV coverage of the French national assembly. A female journalist was interviewing a male politician. Both were sitting on a chaise longue, the kind of furniture that fakes intimacy but mostly just induces utterly mannered postures.

The man was in a position that brought nothing to mind, simply seated there against the back rest. No one would notice that his socks were slightly short. The woman, on the other hand, was all twisted; what would normally give her a distinguished posture simply made her look uncomfortable.

The man wore a suit, not too badly cut. As usual, the politician was an asshole, but he was a presentable one, his outfit and fine elocution allowing him to say things that made no sense. What was key was that he didn't look like he was hustling – unlike the journalist.

Before she sat down, I noticed that her bum was squeezed into rather ordinary trousers, the polyester crepe kind with a waist that sits a little too low for anyone other than a 12-year-old boy. Her torso was stuck in some sort of cache-cœur, a small top supposed to look cute, but which was just too tight. She looked like a ninny, dressed by rote, wearing what she thought made her look feminine rather than what suited her body and her job.

The conventionalities of femininity can be excellent, but too often they end up making women look, less rather than more, than the sum of their parts. Despite the journalist's intelligence and her culture, she seemed diminished.

Don't get me wrong: I do not advocate coldness and old sweatpants. All I ask is that our culture stops asking women to emphasise body parts that call out to men's sexual desire; this desire that is already always there, ready to pop up regardless of elegance or relevance.

This is an issue that affects mainly women. Men are conservative dressers, and so inept at knowing how to play with their masculinity that this field of action – dressing to promote culture's preconceptions of gender – is left wide open for women. But these so-called sexy clothes are often hideous.

Women should dress for themselves, and eventually for other women, and only then maybe also for a handful of men. But they must step out of this outrageously sexed-up hell of signifiers; if they don't, this junk will make them lose their self-respect. I advocate understatement. Search for subtlety, dare to pass as someone reserved, refuse the stereotypes of sexiness. That way, you will spread fever only where it deserves to be.